


Fruit Of A Poisonous Tree

by Sub_Rosa



Category: Homestuck, Homestuck 2
Genre: BAMF Kanaya Maryam, Broken Families, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Cross-Generational Friendship, Days In The Future But Not Many, Dialogue Heavy, Divine Tragicomedy, Enemies To Lovers But It’s Found Family Instead Of Romance, Families of Choice, Family Drama, Gen, Infidelity, Jumping On The Yiffany Train Before She Even Gets Dialogue, Meta, Parental Kanaya Maryam, Reflections on immortality, Rose & Jade’s A+ Parenting, The Candy Timeline Taken Seriously, The Whims Of The Gods, Trans Characters, Trans Female Character, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24327961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sub_Rosa/pseuds/Sub_Rosa
Summary: Growing up, you said, was the process of realizing that everyone you’d ever loved and everyone you’d ever been loved by has always been exactly as awful as you are.
Relationships: Kanaya Maryam & Yiffany Longstocking Lalonde Harley, background Jade Harley/Rose Lalonde, background Kanaya Maryam/Rose Lalonde
Comments: 11
Kudos: 62





	Fruit Of A Poisonous Tree

**i**

“Oh for FUCK’S SAKE,” the kid says, half-inaudible over the din of the engine room, even as she roars. “Not _you_ , too-!”

She visibly cringes away from you as you open the door, shielding her eyes as if she can’t even bear to look at you. In this, you could hate her, but it’s just as easy to understand her.

After all, you can’t bear to look at her, either.

“I didn’t realize I was one of many,” you say when you’ve finally gathered your thoughts, stepping into the room. “In whose footsteps am I meant to be following, then?”

The kid just scoffs, sitting in the absence of words.

She watches you do your work on the engines from her place in the corner, washed-out and sallow, and when you’re done, she speaks up again:

“You didn’t actually come down here looking for me, did you?”

You can’t help but bite out a laugh when she says it, shaking your head. “Why should I be?”

“Everyone else was,” the kid says sullenly. _That’s why I’m down here_ goes unsaid.

You leave her alone in the engine room with only the din of the machinery to keep her company, and you close the door behind you.

**ii**

“You didn’t rat me out,” the kid says when you find her again the next day. She says it like the words shouldn’t even be able to fit in her mouth, curious and puzzled and more than a little disbelieving.

“Should I have?” you ask rhetorically.

You already know the answer, of course. Yes, you should have ‘ratted her out’. Consigned her to the whiptails. Told her _mothers_ where she was. That would have been the responsible thing to do.

You didn’t do anything about her disappearing act, the closest thing she could manage to a runner on an airship two kilometers above the ground, because you weren’t sure you cared. Or maybe you did care on some level, but you didn’t think it was your responsibility.

Or maybe you cared, and knew you had to be responsible, because _obviously_ no-one else would - but you knew that the longer she could get away from her parents, the more they would panic. Did you want to see it happen, to watch the love of your life fret herself into anxious circles? Of course you did. It felt good to know something that Rose didn’t.

The greatest lie you’ve ever told is the farce that you’re not spiteful, not venomous. Always a rock in the storm. And if Rose could see all of the paths to victory, but couldn’t even find her own daughter, then what victory could have existed for you to deny her by leaving her to her own ignorance?

You have done nothing but pick the way in which she was going to lose, and pick out the way you thought you wanted to see her lose the most. A harmless retort, no more or less than pettiness.

No more or less cruel for its casual character.

“I think,” the kid says, “that you _would have_ , no matter whether you ‘should have’ or not.”

“If that’s what you think about me, then you never knew anything about me at all.”

The kid shrugs at that, and you take to your work with the same abandon as you always do.

“It was pretty stupid of me,” she grants, “to think I knew you just because I knew of you.”

“We all think stupid things, I suppose.”

She still flinches away from you when you look at her, sitting in the same place as yesterday, as if she’s never moved at all. She has, of course, given her conspicuous change of clothes from one dirty set to another set, dirtied in a slightly different way.

“There’s a very good reason nobody else comes down here,” you say when you’re done with your work again. “I would rather not have to explain to your parents how you fell into the reactor and died, so how about I give you the keys to the storage closet across the hall, and you can recluse yourself there instead?”

The two of you leave the engine room alone, with only the din of the machinery to keep it company, and you close the door behind you.

**iii**

“I _distinctly_ remember locking this door,” you say, when you find the kid in the engine room for the third time in a row. “I made sure of it, in fact. So how about you tell me: do I want to know by what sleight of hand you’ve been getting in anyways?”

“It’s just lockpicking,” she says churlishly, squinting up at you, vaguely defiant. “The closet was too cluttered.”

“Yes, I noticed you took the liberty of reorganizing. And then didn’t put anything back when you decided you still didn’t have enough floorspace to sprawl upon.”

She scowls. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Take back the keys to the storage closet, obviously.”

“Please! Lady, I just told you I’m a sneak-thief.”

“And if I make even the slightest bit more work for your doggedly larcenous ways I’ll consider it time well spent.”

Despite your words, you make no moves to take the keys back. Even if it would be easier than anything to just reach out and pluck them from her, whisking away like light on the air.

From the way she looks at you, you suppose she notices.

You open the engine casing, stripping it bare to its mechanical belts, all furious crimson, and brush the edge of a fingertip to the red ribbons, feeling out their weave. The traction drags a welt against your hand, and you don’t even notice. Like a spider on her web, all you feel is the rest of the cats-cradle.

The rest of the rebel fleet opens about you like the deep, and with a deft hand you begin to untangle their mess. Knots uncoiled, distance conjugated - a vessel you recognize as a refugee carrier by the stretching of its civilian specifications to the limit, you hasten on its path with a flourish, shortening the way. A blockade of ships you reinforce with cosmic string, cutting off more space than their position and geometry should allow for.

All this and more you attend to with the care of an ancient seamstress, reaching out across the weft of every stitch you’ve ever sewn and mending the threads that no-one is ever going to wear. All this and more allow you to consume you, working harder than you ever have before. Even having lost, you keep winning. Even having won, you’ve lost.

“I get it, you know,” the kid says, watching you bleed, her eyes following your every move as you work your fingers down to the bone. “I like it down here, too.”

This is your problem, Kanaya: you let the kid hide with you because you’ve been hiding too. You let the kid run away from her parents because you’ve been running away from them, too.

You find a box of thimbles on your desk the next morning.

**iv**

You tell Vrissy where she can find you, of course - not because anyone, let alone her, doesn’t already know _where_ you are, but because you need her to know that you are _there for her_ , even now.

“Why did you lie to me?” she asks you one night, while you toil yet away at the silk of strategy. “Why did you tell me nothing was going to change?”

It’s comically self-centered, of course, for you lied to many more people than just her, and you lied to all their faces. But you couldn’t hold it against her even if you wanted to, because she’s your daughter, and she’s hurting - and perhaps you do want to hold it against her, but you always knew what you were getting into, at least with her. She’s your _daughter_ , and she’s still a child, and even if she’s a Maryam and a Lalonde, she’s also still a Serket.

“I didn’t lie to you,” you say gently.

“Ahahahah BULLSHIT.” She’s furious, literally quaking in her boots. “Why are we still pretending you’re going along with this!? Nothing is the same-! Nothing is-! Nothing is remotely fucking okay about this!”

“You’re right,” you say. “It’s not okay.” It’s not okay, even if it’s not for the reasons she thinks. Even if it’s not for the reasons _you_ think.

“Then why?”

Why _did_ you go along with it? Because the world was still moving on, a sea of moving parts, moving at the speed of sound? Because you simply had no time to tell Rose that nothing was going to be the same? Of course. You weren’t going to waste your breath while so many of the people you still loved were still ever but a hair’s breadth from breathing their last.

Did you go along with the farce because it came from Rose? Of course. You always do. She is the flame and the light at the end of the tunnel and you will burn to death on her again and again but you will never die because that merciful release simply doesn’t exist for people like you.

None of that is what matters, though, not now. Not to your daughter or to you.

“When I told you that everything was fine between me and your mother, that was a kind of lie,” you admit. “Because it’s not fine. _Obviously_ it’s not ‘fine’. But I needed to say it anyway, because the ways it weren’t ‘fine’ weren’t the kind of things I knew how to say to you or anyone else - and I needed to say it anyway, because I needed you to know that I was still going to be there for you. I needed you to know that whatever happened between her and I, we were still going to be your parents. And that’s a truth that’s not going to change.”

Vrissy hugs you like she’s never going to let you go in this lifetime. She wraps herself around you tight enough to pop your ribs.

And the kid just stands where she’s found the two of you, watching her sister from the open doorway like a gutted voyeur, mouth parted without words. She looks like she’s been crying again, just like she did when you first found her down here, run ragged and wan - but she looks like she’s never stopped, tears streaming from her eyes, snot running from her nose along the rictus grin of her grimace, too furiously hurt and heartbroken and wretched even to sob, to howl, to spit-

She turns and scrubs her face and runs away, sidling silently along the edge of the hallway before Vrissy lets go.

**v**

The kid doesn’t return to the engine room for several days, by which point you’ve all but converted the entire space into your new command center, unfolded every metal mechanism into the delicate machinery of your loom.

When you find her again, you turn on the lights instead of bringing your own. Warm carbon filaments fill the air in place of your baleful glow, and the kid just hisses briefly instead of turning her whole head away.

If there’s ever been a time when she couldn’t bear to look at you, it’s only now. Not then, when you scoured her blind by your thoughtless radiance.

But you say nothing, and when the silence around you grows too vast to be borne, punctuated only by the the cotton-muffled humming and clacking of your tools, she speaks instead:

“Rose thinks I’ve been running off to spend time with you. I had to tell her otherwise.”

“Well of course you haven’t been spending time with me,” you say. “You’ve only been spending time in the same room as me. Conspicuously. Persistently.”

“Oh, fuck off,” the kid says, but her anger now is about as fake as your sarcasm - at least until your words settle in. “Fuck off! Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck OFFFF-!”

You put down your work as she stomps up to you, fuming in incoherent rage. And honestly, you’re jealous of her.

You wish your anger so elided capture. You want to be so enlightened in your fury, such a saint in your rage. But you’re not. You never get angry enough to forget yourself.

You just get angry enough to be sick of yourself, instead.

“Be honest,” you say. “Why did you pick ‘Yiffany’-?”

“SHUT UP!” The kid grabs you by your collar, pulling you down and forward. “SHUT UP! SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT THE FUCK UP-! YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT-”

“Yes,” you say. “I do.”

She drops you when the tears come again, like you won’t see them anymore once you hit the ground.

“You’re lying. You’re fucking lying.”

“You don’t believe that,” you say softly, looking up at her. “Even if you wish you did.”

When the kid’s crying lulls, she chokes her words out again.

“It’s stupid.”

“We all do stupid things, I suppose.”

“I wanted to make them give me a reason to hate them like I hate you,” she says. “Rose set me aside to keep you happy, and Jade set me aside to keep Rose happy, but even when I tried to stop, I still loved them. I needed to make them do something I couldn’t forgive. You know how that works, don’t you?”

Yeah.

You do. Not just for yourself, but for her, too.

It’s so like Rose you could cry - and you will, as Jade’s features blur and recede into the background of your wife’s face, handed off to yet another girl growing up alone when she doesn’t have to, playing games she can’t win with a mother who loves her when love is never enough.

“I picked a name I thought even a mother couldn’t love. I wanted them to say ‘no’, so that I could trick myself into thinking that they were saying ‘no’ to who I really was. And if they couldn’t say ‘no’, then I wanted them to squirm every time they opened their fucking mouths to call my name. But Jade just thinks it’s _sweet_. It’s _sick_. And Rose won’t even flinch.” Because Rose would never blink first, the kid was decades early to play this game, and she never had a chance, and the world let her think she did, and that was almost even worse-

“Your mothers may have accepted you,” you say. “But the people who actually took care of you didn’t, did they?”

The kid’s face screws up. “If I could hate Rose and Jade just for passing the buck, I wouldn’t be here to begin with.”

“But the people who raised you hurt you,” you say gently. “Do you forgive your mothers because it ‘wasn’t their fault’, or because you’ve chosen to forget how much they let you be hurt?”

And the kid cries like it’s the first time in her life she’s ever cried; cries like she’s never, ever going to stop.

**vi**

“Far be it from me to be an insufferable cliche,” you say, when the kid is done wiping her eyes on the tattered sleeves of her blazer. “But I know I would feel remiss if I left you out in the cold you call boymode.”

“I would literally rather die,” she says, but she follows you out of the engine room, regardless. And when you’re done taking her measurements:

“My name is Pippa,” she says, and she doesn’t need to say why she’s telling you for you to understand it nonetheless.

**vii**

“I didn’t mean to run into you the first time,” Pippa admits later, joining you on the railing that overlooks the side of your airship. “But after I did… I did go looking for you.”

You nod, waiting for her to put her thoughts in order.

“I hated you. Maybe I still kind of do, at least a little. But… I hated Rose and Jade more. Even when I didn’t hate them enough to let go. And I needed to know how you did it. How do you do it? How do you work with them when you don’t have the choice to hole yourself up? How do you live with them and work with them like you don’t hate their fucking guts?”

“I don’t hate their guts,” you murmur, but she shakes her head furiously.

“Yeah, you do. Vrissy was right.” (This last she says distastefully, like she’s agreeing with the single worst person she’s ever met.) “They hurt you, too.”

It’s true; they _did_ hurt you. They hurt you more terribly than you had ever been hurt in a long time, in a way that you had always thought you were safe from - because this was the kind of thing that only happened in stories, the kind of thing that only happened to other people.

And yet-

“The way they hurt me is nothing like the way they hurt you,” you confess. “And that’s why I don’t know if I can help you do anything but hate them more.”

“Try me.”

You sigh. “Pippa, why do you think I married your mother to begin with?”

“Uh.” She works her jaw dumbly. “Because you loved her?”

“Because I love her, yes,” you agree. “But there were any number of ways I could have shown it. Have you ever really spoken to the ghosts from the cracks in the sky-? No? We didn’t even have marriage on Alternia, you understand.”

She starts.

“I always forget it must have been different before,” she says.

“We all do. We think it doesn’t matter anymore, that it’s in the past - but the past keeps coming back to haunt us.

“When I was just a wriggler, Alternia didn’t just teach us to name our loves and hates. It taught us to parcel ourselves out in tiny pieces, to carve up our hearts. When I married Rose, I thought that was the thing I was moving past. I thought it was the proof of a love beyond the quadrants, a sign of our commitment to sharing everything with each other.”

“And how did that work out for you?” she snorts.

“As well as it could have, when we were marrying each other for two completely different reasons.” Your gimlet eye breaks upon her impetuous demeanor. “Marriage… didn’t mean to Rose what it meant to me. Not because she didn’t love me, or because she didn’t love me enough, but because she didn’t know any other way to show it. Marrying me was the way in which she was taught to carve up her heart, and I only wish I had seen that sooner.”

“You’re saying that Rose cheated on you _because of her shitty backstory_ ,” Pippa says, disbelieving, and you can’t help but crack a thin smile at the disgusted look on the kid’s face.

“Well, I suppose you could put it that way. But I told you I wasn’t going to flatter her, didn’t I?”

“That’s not ENOUGH!” she yowls. “You can’t forgive her just because you’re stupid and crazy enough you think she didn’t know any better-!”

“No,” you agree. “And that’s why I haven’t forgiven her. All I’ve done is understand her. And that’s part of how I’m going to forgive her, someday - but not today. Not for a very, very long time.”

“You say that like you’ve already decided to forgive her,” she says. Horrified and confused. “How is that any different from having done it already?”

“Because,” you say. “Forever is even longer than you know.”

“AND I DON’T HAVE FOREVER, DO I?” She starts to shake. “AND NEITHER DO YOU, BECAUSE WE’RE ALL GOING TO-”

When you reach out to put a hand on her shoulder, she slaps it away, trembling silently.

“Rose and Jade hurt me,” you say, as gently as you can, holding her with your words where you can’t hold her with your hands. “They hurt me so very badly. They lied to me. But I never would have asked them to give me what they did, and that’s why I would have already tried to forgive them, if they hadn’t hurt _you_ so very badly in order to give me the marriage they thought _I_ wanted. And that’s something I could never forgive them for, even if it was my place to forgive them - but it’s not my place. It’s yours. And there’s nothing I can teach you that will make it any easier for you, because I don’t know how to forgive people like a mortal anymore.”

**vii**

When she finally hugs you, you think for a second that she’s holding you like a rock, like a daughter who needs a mother - and maybe she is, at least for a second. A minute. But she holds you like she’s trying to comfort you, too.

“You spend so much time worrying about me even when you would rather do anything but,” she says into your chest. “Don’t you ever worry about yourself?”

The brute reality you can’t and shouldn’t force her to understand is the truth you’ve known ever since you saw her for the first time, snapping at her mothers and flinching from touch: they did to her exactly what was done to you.

You are all going to live forever, each and every one of you, because nothing ever ends and nothing ever dies. You have seen the black abyss where the dead wandered in their ways for perpetuity, a thousand thousand Kanayas and a thousand thousand Roses finding each other and others even in purgatory, all of them granted their own allotted infinity: all of them erased again by the angel of double death or hurled unto the bauble of your reality. You have seen universes end and be born again alongside the people who lived within them, death turned back to life. The very face of reality reduced to farce with the dawning of each act of your play.

But the one thing that never changes is that you and yours will never be far from the stage, because the play will always have another installment. And this, too, the girl will understand someday, but she will always be what she was, just as every Rose and every Kanaya will always have once been scarred by what happened to them before their eternity began.

This is the unforgivable thing that hurts even when you learn to let go.

“I think,” you say, “this is what worrying about myself looks like, when I’m a god.”

“Then it’s not enough to worry about yourself like a god,” the girl says. “Won’t you worry about yourself like a person, too?”

“I haven’t been a person in a very long time.”

“Then I’ll teach you,” she says. “Or if you can’t stop worrying about me like a person - then I’ll worry about you like a person in return, too, okay?”

Her face blurs precipitously, but not with the image of anyone else’s face - it’s just her, and she’s never been anything or anybody else. Her face blurs along with the rest of her because you’re tearing up as hard as she is, tears wicking away on the whipping air.

“Let’s go back inside before you catch a cold,” you say, and she stiffens like you’re going to push her away.

You don’t make her let go.


End file.
